Panoramic photography, the taking of a photograph or photographs covering an elongated field of view, has a long history in photography. Perhaps the most primitive method of panoramic photography is the taking of several adjoining photos with a conventional camera and then mounting the prints together in alignment to achieve a complete panorama. Modern techniques adapt this method by using digital cameras to capture the images, and then using computer image processing techniques to align the images for printing as a single panorama.
The continuous development of digital camera technologies along with constantly increasing speed and processing power of computers have laid the foundation for digital imaging systems that are capable of acquiring image data for the automatic creation of wide to entire 360° panoramas, including both still panoramic images and dynamic panoramic movies.
Detection and tracking of moving objects are critical in the area of computer vision. Detection and tracking of moving objects in a video stream may often require complex image processing, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and/or adaptive control, especially in in a panoramic video stream and/or an image sequence. The main challenge of detection and tracking of moving objects lies in the processing and understanding of images with complicated background context.
Different techniques related to detection and tracking of moving objects are widely used in military visual guidance, robot navigation, safety surveillance, traffic control, medical diagnosis, virtual reality and battlefield vigilance, public-safety monitoring, man-machine interaction, and/or image compression. Among all techniques of detection and tracking of moving objects, color histogram is extensively adopted due to many advantages including feature stability, anti-occlusion, methodology simplicity and moderate computational complexity. The main drawback, however, is the low tracking robustness resulted from its vulnerability to illumination, vision and camera settings, as well as from the background interference.